This evening in Sao Paulo, a paralyzed teenager wearing an exoskeleton will walk onto a football field and kick a ball to ceremonially mark the beginning of the World Cup. The technology has been developed the Walk Again project, which is run by a group of scientists and engineers drawn from research institutes throughout the world — the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering, the Technical University of Munich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the University of California, Davis, the University of Kentucky, and the Duke immersive Virtual Environment — and led by the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis.

The goal is a brain-machine interface controlled by a person’s thoughts. The vision is of a world without wheelchairs in which the quality of life for the disabled would grow dramatically. Let the World Cup begin!